Call of the Void
by Gray Glube
Summary: This is how they fall in love, for real, this time.
1. Chapter 1

**Author:** grayglube

**Title:** Call of the Void

**Summary:** This is how they fall in love, for real, this time.

**Rating:** M

**Warning(s)/Kinks: **Language, sexual situations, drug use, triggery language related to rape, femslash, offensive language related to homosexuality, sexual assault.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own American Horror Story.

**A/N:** So this is a fic I have been trying to write for awhile, like with every fic I set out to do this and it just doesn't get there. To be completely honest I tried to write this like **paceyourself **would write a fic. Which takes work guys! Seriously. I love that girl's way with words, she's going to read that and be like 'ME?' because she's adorably humble but she writes like…I don't what, but something that knows how to write things that make me feel, god dammit, I'm a robot, and we are not supposed to feel. Just kidding. I'm not a robot. It's a post-finale that I think is a bit more plausible than my other post-finale fics. It's about Violet and Tate falling in love, again. They say some pretty horrible things to each other. This first part takes place over ten years; the scenes are not in order.

* * *

**I.**

Sometimes when she sleeps or moves like ghosts really do (through the wood and the pipes and the exhaled air of the people who still breathe) there's a blindness and a speed that empties her of everything but fear. It's what driving a car on a moonless night with no headlights and an overcast sky with no stars and no light (no light, no light), and not being able to stop or tell what's in front of you while rain slaps the blackness of a windshield you can't see out of must be like. She tries to find a word for it, settles between 'velocity' and 'vertigo' while finding nothing to take up the place between the two. Verticity. Velogo. It's like falling to the bottom of the sea, and she doesn't know why she thinks of it as falling instead of sinking. Settling on the inevitability of falling, the finality of it as why she comes to think of sea bottom as endless depth. Sinking is just floating in reverse, slow, soft. Falling is fear, that's why you have to wake up in dreams of falling because they say you die if you don't.

She remembers telling him that being around while the world moves along outside without them is being trapped in a windowless cell. She'd been talking about the house, but the house is just the prison and they've all got their assigned holes to crawl back in. His is the basement. She realizes, belatedly, that it's because it's Nora's too.

Basements don't really change all that much, scenery wise, or company wise, regardless of the decade.

She figures that most of them feel that way.

But then some of them have places they've made their own. Charles and his Frankenstein workbench. Beau and his attic. Her and the pantry.

Her father jokes and says it's the "captain's quarters", her mother had come in and upon mishearing it repeated "captive's quarters", and really, Violet thinks, what's the difference?

It's wood paneled and looks like the inside of something, like a ship really, not a house at all. A private hideaway. A sunk ship or something.

There're some old bed frames, an ugly lamp table with a busted leg, and a reupholstered mod couch that isn't very comfortable but better than sleeping on the floor. It's white canvas under the tan suede, and there's a brown, scabby stain that hasn't been completely buffed out.

She's got an afghan throw that she found in a sagging cardboard box, it still smells like must and mothballs a little and won't stretch over her completely unless she hooks her toes into it and pulls at it; it's stale but no less warm or soft.

There's a fixture next to the doorway that used to have a decorative ensconcement but bares just a solitary and plain light bulb now, it casts a sodium yellow glow on the small little cell she secludes herself in, and reading in the dimness hurts her eyes sometimes.

She keeps some books tucked under the uncomfortable couch along with a coffee mug she ashes into. It's a private little hermitage she keeps to during the daylight hours.

Late at night when she doesn't leave, it feels like the house is rocking her to sleep.

She's spent most of her time alone anyway. The time she spent with him surmounted to a footnote in the scope of her life, an epitaph to her virginal teenage years, the words on her metaphorical tombstone, or the 'Cause of Death' on a piece of paper that would get signed by some world weary medical examiner who would have gotten to hold her ruddy brown liver and plop the coils of her large and small bowel into a metal bowl before slitting her stomach open with fluorescents gleaming off the shiny sharpness of the scalpel and have thirty pills, give or take the ones in the drain trap of the master bath, cascade over his latex clad fingers with a wash of churned bile and stomach acid, _if_ someone had ever found her corpse.

The loneliness creeps in. Scampers really. Or skitters, like dry leaves escaping a meticulous pile under an oak beset by autumn chills and shorter days across wooden floors. It skitters in with a prolonged rasp and a chill that ebbs into her lungs when she pulls in a drag.

There's a feeling to loneliness in the time right before sunrise, when it's blue and there's still no orange and pink and purple plumage to the skyline horizon, when the world is muted sounds and a breeze like a sigh. The feeling is a perfect ache, minus the bitter and the out of your skin discomfort of sloth. It's being alone more than being lonely. She sits on the bricks and smokes running a palm over an arm's prickle of goosebumps.

Being alone or lonely puts an extra simple sort of exquisite slant on things. Everything thrums like it's waiting. It makes the coolness in the air feel good and the damp petchor scent heady. Worst, though, it makes the idle hope of him showing up and sitting next to her to facilitate her cigarette lighting so much better than before.

And just like that, when she sighs heavily, all shoulders and sweater, it feels like the chill is the breeze blowing away everything in her that's crumbled like ruins, like her ghost bones are so much dust and someone has left a window open somewhere inside of her.

* * *

She's blooming, unfolding inside herself. Inside that room. Outside at dusk, before a dawning sunrise of bleeding tropicana colors. In his absence. All alone she doesn't really need him. And it feels good, in a suffered sort of strangled joy, he aches but maybe so does she. Flowers can't bloom in the dark and that's all of what she stands in front of day after day, but inside she's everlasting light and he hopes whatever's growing in her creeps out of her like vines in the dark and ensnares him so that at least while she's making him die, strangled by those vines of hers, and causes him to rot away to scraps of flesh and bone he can at the very least poison the soil he seeps into and ruin all her pretty blooms, at least then they can wither away together.

She's turned him into something much worse than anything he was before. At least then, when he rampaged around shooting people and setting them on fire and snapping their necks, everything was done on conscious thought. It's her fault, really. It is. Because even those things hadn't scared her away. She's made of sterner stuff than that. Her fears draw from a different spring of darker waters. Waters with skins over the surface them from all the filth that hasn't settled in the silt. It's her fault if her light can't illuminate what's in the corners of his mind or soul through the holes he's pocked with from collar bone to navel. It's her fault. She's so used to being left alone that she can't stand him slipping back in, over and over, even after she flicks on the lights or shuts the closet door or checks under the bed. He's her bogeyman, he'll hide where she doesn't think to look and watch her from the foot of her bed after she's gone to sleep. He can't stop, he'll wait forever if he has to. The worst thing she ever taught him was patience.

He wants to be what she resorts to late at night, when whatever paths her aimless mental meanderings go down make her gut clench and her face hot and her sex plump and wet. He wants to be where all those paths end, where the idea begins, where she rubs herself across and on top of. He wants to leave his fingerprints on the squiggly meninges protected by hard cranium. Wants to bite into a lung and suck out her last breath.

* * *

Michael gives her band-aids for her booboos, they have little boy cartoon favorites on them. Cars with toothy mouths grin up at her from her scabbed knees.

She doesn't get it. She still bruises. Her cuts don't heal unless they go too deep.

There's a wry smile making her lips peel away from her teeth, it's funny how his son offers her something for them, something besides a disapproving coercement to stop making them, like _He_ did, sucking at her wrist and licking the redness of her dead-life off his teeth.

Michael is seven and he's a lot like his father. You'd never know just by looking at them.

You'd never know anything about them at all.

* * *

He's got an old issue of homes and gardens, the final serving of dregs and backwash whiskey in a bottle left out after the party, a chill wind blowing through his sweater, burning his elbows and the backs of shoulders with the friction, and a repeating soundtrack of a country song countdown from a house that has a window open somewhere close by, it's funny. Reminds him of something he read by Keats. Books, and wine, and weather, and music. His reality is just a more dismal version of beautiful prose.

* * *

There's a look that settles over his face (appears is what it really does, since it's always been under everything else), like whatever guise he was wearing before that moment evaporated into the ether and what's there is what's left, what's solid. He breathes through his nose, hard and his cheeks get sharper for a brief almost instant, his eyes slit and he stares at you out from under them, sometimes he'll roll them, he moves his head like a cobra rising does, chin down but rising all the same. It's a look Chad or Hayden is usually on the receiving end of, but he used to get it other times too. When he'd push her back towards the bed, but there'd be a smile and all she'd want was to know was what all that darkness tasted like. The kind inside of him, the kind he was made of. She saw it and she let it eat all her light. It sounds like an innuendo and she sort of means it to be.

She dreams about it sometimes.

She decides to stop sleeping.

* * *

The little boy looks at him and says, "You're my dad."

"Yes."

He grins, like he's solved the mystery. "I live with grandma because you're dead."

"Yes."

"I killed my mom." Tate can say a lot of things, tell the kid it's not really his fault. But if he blames it on himself instead it's the same as saying that the kid shouldn't be alive and like it or not the little boy is _his_ little boy. He feels things he hadn't thought he'd feel.

He has a kid. "You wanted to come out," is what he settles with when the kid starts shifting around and dancing in place for an answer, all fidgety hands and postural sway.

"Why don't you visit me?"

"Because I'm bad."

Tate knows he shouldn't be around, but in a sick way he wants to be. His dad wasn't around even when he was stuck hanging in the house of the living dead for forever. Constance ignored him, Hugo abandoned him.

Vivien's abandoned this kid in favor of her cuter, smaller, less malevolent offspring and he's been ignoring him because it just makes him think about Violet and how he hasn't seen her, really seen her, in years now.

He can see history repeating, he was ten once too, and lately with nothing else in his eternal entrapment promising any sort of relief from boredom, or pain, he decides to pretend like he cares, like the kid does matter, to him at least. He knows what it's like for the only person to care about what you do being Constance.

"I've been bad too," Michael admits.

"You shouldn't come over here, it's dangerous. There are other bad people here."

People who would kill for a cute little kid of their own, and then where would he be? Stuck in the house, around to remind everyone about the sins of his father and eternity looks longer every day.

"You can't leave; I have to come visit _you_."

Eventually Tate starts looking forward to the visits.

* * *

Violet likes talking to Patrick, where Chad's all vinegar and piss and sass he's cheap beer, tasteless conversation and snark. It started when she'd decided to stop sleeping, starting instead to wander aimlessly. She thinks the night she ran into Pat outside he'd been crying, but it had been dark and he denied it at the time when she asked.

It's weird but she'd felt like crying too, then. Maybe because it was an excuse to do so if someone else was. But she didn't. She offered him a cigarette and she guesses friendship is just that easy sometimes.

She guesses the reason she favors one gay gal pal over the other is simply because Chad's a snope and she's always been more of a sweep it under the rug kind of girl. Violet knows that when someone goes looking for something wrong they're probably going to find it. Been there, done that and died.

She's also got a never-gonna-happen, never-want-to-happen sort of attraction she's keeps to herself regarding Pat.

He calls her a fag hag one day and she suggests they have their own sitcom. She says they could name it "Sassy and Surly."

It's New Year's Eve, her second post-demise and third overall, and they're out in the gazebo smoking stolen cigars.

"You look really out of place trying to smoke that."

"You don't with that in your mouth."

"Almost had your dad in my mouth."

"Eww."

"It's a five year goal, at this point it's gone long-term work in progress."

"Shut up."

"I was trying to do it by the Royal wedding so I could have a 'Blow Big Ben' theme going on when they showed it on television."

She doesn't talk about Tate but Patrick is more than happy to talk about Chad.

"He couldn't be happy without grand gestures. Maybe he could and I just couldn't figure out how to do without grand gestures," Pat shrugs and looks at her.

"You're lucky. You've never had to wake up knowing that once the person you're sleeping next to wakes up that the first thing they'll do when they roll over and see you is latch onto some resentment they have from before you went to sleep to pick at until it bleeds, until you get out of bed and slam the door or yell. You've never had to be in a relationship where the only right thing to do in that situation is let the person shit on you and then beg for a treat."

She rolls smoke around in her mouth while he's leaning over the railing to peer up at the stars. His voice is softer and quieter when he starts speaking again.

"It's awful. I could have been happy, he could have too but we just held onto all the bullshit because we'd like to yell at each other better than talk and figure out the little things that could make the other happy. We kept getting sidetracked, we never got around to really trying to make each other happy."

What she wants to ask is, 'Do you think you'll ever try again,' but she stops herself because she's a coward who's afraid he'd turn around and ask the same of her.

Because for herself the answer is a loud and resounding 'no,' but for some reason she doesn't want his to be. She wonders if a part of herself still holds out for happy endings when it comes to other people, wonders if she's made out for all that herself.

* * *

The woman is all highbrow pretentiousness and long coral pink nails. She doesn't like him, he doesn't need three guesses as to why.

"I didn't kill her."

They both know who he's talking about.

"No, but you played a part."

"I've changed."

Billie-Dean scoffs. "Not telling lies does not mean you've changed, it just means you've stopped hiding. What you are scares people. It scares your mother and it scared Addie and it scared _her_ enough to want to die to get away from you."

"So why are you here?"

"This house is a part of that boy."

"What boy."

"Your _son_."

"So what?"

"I'm not going to be of any help to your mother."

"What does she need help with?"

"He killed his nanny, he's three."

"I _know_ how old he is."

"Do you know what he's capable of?"

"Apparently, so far, second degree murder of Hispanic child care providers who don't let him eat cookies for lunch."

"It's in his nature."

"I'm on the nurture side of the argument myself. I learned it from my mother; you know she murdered my dad? She fed him to the dogs in the basement; one started shitting blood because it had eaten a couple of his teeth. They ended up tearing apart his intestines, it was pretty gross, you know? Death by canines. Kind of ironic."

* * *

"_Seven year itch?"_

It's what he'd asked her one day, with a sharp grin from the top of the stairs. She hadn't realized she'd been watching until he'd pointed it out.

But Pat just dropped down a few steps with the hollow thud of his expensive runner sneakers with tacky neon yellow tread curling up over the black mesh sounded loudly on the wooden staircase. He'd leaned against the banister and watched Moira scrub the baseboards.

She asked him what he saw. He replied with a laconic 'same.'

She told him it was because he was a sex maniac and thought everyone else was too. He told her it was because she was undersexed.

Chad had something to say about Moira a few months later as the weather got warmer, "Is out little flower having her spring awakening?"

She'd been rolling solo minus Her Majesty Chad's horrible hubby. It was then that she realized when Moira looked back at her from leaning over the kitchen island to showcase the curved lace edge of her underwear while retrieving dishes that the redhead looked the way she did to her when she was around her. On purpose.

And everyone knew.

"You're drunk," Violet sneered after ignoring the way the other woman sashayed from the room. Chad snorted.

"Yeah, drunk. Not blind."

"…"

She had a lot of things she could say but she was trying to stop her verbal purging as of late.

He took a sip of white wine and pulled the cracker he'd been about to chew on away from his mouth, tilted his head and made a clicking sound against the back of his teeth, "Don't bite your tongue on my account."

"No thanks."

"Leave her alone. Have another drink, darling."

Pat swept in, indignant and irritated.

"Oooh, someone else has found a new girlfriend. Funny. She goes gay as soon as you decide to stick that dick somewhere you haven't since highschool. And with someone who wasn't even out of it yet, how Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert. Patrick Patrick, has a nice ring to it."

"That's enough."

The kitchen was going to go nuclear from all the bitch hormones flaring in the space between the two men. Pat rolled his eyes and stalked out, before she went Violet made a point to get in at least one dig, "And that's why you are always stuck drinking alone in the kitchen because you can't control yourself and what comes out of your mouth."

* * *

"We're not so different kid."

"Don't call me 'kid'."

"I forget, sorry. Rambo."

He's just relocated to the attic, a few days of solitude and then Ben's mistress just showed up. As it was she'd been coming up to play with his brother. He asks her why and she tells him it's because Beau gets lonely. After a moment she tells him that Violet is lonely too.

When he questions why she's telling him something he already knows she just shrugs, rolls the ball back to Beau and tells him that maybe she was wrong, that maybe Violet will take him back. One day.

It irritates him, talking about Violet to other people, like they have any idea what it was like between them. Like they understand. They don't know shit. He tells her that his problems are nothing like her problems with Dr. Harmon, that Ben never loved her, and won't.

She tells him that telling her that is cruel and she doesn't dispute the truth in the statement.

But, Hayden doesn't let it go so easily it turns out. She says, "But you know...the problem with her now is that she's comfortable being lonely. She likes it. She likes not being around you. Likes how it feels."

* * *

Travis taught the girls how to make themselves pretty, Hayden's been teaching them little things they'll never need, like multiplication or the names of plants and different bugs. Travis and Hayden, _'who would have thought?'_

Despite her poking him full of holes and him giving her a red smile they seem to do well together. Friends with benefits or some shit like that.

The girls wander upstairs one day and find her. They ask her if she wants to play princesses with them. What could she say besides yes? Nothing that wouldn't make them cry, so she says yes and they say she can be Sleeping Beauty since Cinderella and Snow White are already taken. They offer her Tinkerbelle too but Sleeping Beauty holds a certain kind of irony for her.

When they find they don't have anything princess dress worthy to dress her in they spend their time making her up into something little girl pretty that involves bright lipstick, barrettes with flowers on them, and shoes she can't walk down the stairs in.

"My toes will get dirty," she tells the littlest sister after she's strapped her feet into a huge pair of platform sandals made to look like a throwback to disco.

"Get the socks!" Angie screams, her sister winces and scowls. "You have pretty feet," Angie tells her with a goofy kid smile.

"Stupid!" Margaret flaps the socks around and tosses them at her sister, "Feet _cannot _be pretty."

"Can to! Pretty feet, pretty feet," Angie singsongs back raises Violet's foot to her sister's face, pulling Violet almost off the chair to rub her sole across Margaret's cheek.

"Get 'em offa meeeee!"

"Angie, Margaret! That's enough."

Lorraine stands smoldering in the open doorway.

"Sorry mom." Big sis says.

"Sorry." Little sis echoes.

"Come on."

"But…," Lorraine levels Margaret with a clear and cloudy eyed look that leaves the little girl faltering a bit before picking her tentative explanation up again, "But we were going to play with Violet."

"We were gonna dress her up," Angie explains.

"Not now, later. Come on."

"Ugh, fine." Margaret stalks out all little girl sass and sway, Lorraine swats her on the arm as she walks past. Angie looks like she might cry, Violet catches her wrist and smiles, "I'll come down later, okay?" Angie smiles back and skitters out of the room.

"You will not." Lorraine tells her after the girls aren't around to hear her.

"What?"

"He finally went to the attic, I don't want him back in the basement. He follows you like a dog. I won't have him around my girls."

"…"

"I'm sorry."

"Go away, Lorraine."

Left alone Violet wonders how many other things he can ruin, even when he isn't around.

* * *

A new family moves in. He has thoughts he's not proud of. Thoughts of sneaking into the yuppies daughter's bedroom at night to get someone's attention. Some night when the girl has gone to sleep he wonders if Violet would get jealous. He decides not to risk it if jealousy turns out to not be the way to work things.

Any temptation of watching the training version of a Barbie scientist doll, all blonde with big glasses, a push up bra and a prep school education is stunted by the realization that watching her take a shower or masturbate or dance around in her underwear is that it isn't her he really wants to watch do those things.

He does however move into the attic where he can hear her play music and laugh with friends and curse over homework assignments or what's on television because he can pretend the first girl to inhabit the room never left.

* * *

Moira comes and goes, leaving advice and the smell of Lysol in her wake.

It's after her sixth Thanksgiving in the Murder House that Moira finds her. The holiday had not gone well, mostly because she'd pulled some scare tactics during the lush little dinner the living had cooked up. Moira was serving the turkey.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, the old maid threatened to disembowel her with a carving knife if she persisted with knocking cranberry sauce and gravy onto the carpet.

Moira found her again when everyone had gone to bed, slightly drunk and more than a bit wary of the house and the things that could be making it groan and growl late at night.

"Violet, you need to stop this. Or at least not bother with anything besides what you're doing. Don't poison everything around you because you're bored."

"I thought it'd make me feel better. Making him feel worse."

And she knows Moira knows. Knows who she went to see. Knows what she went looking for. Knows what she got out of it.

"It _never_ works out that way."

"I don't feel anything, not really."

"Violet…"

"Stop it. Lorraine does it. You do it. Make other people feel how you feel, I'm not allowed to be angry or scared? I'm not allowed to have that? I'm dead, what else do I fucking have?"

It's like a thread snapping.

You see what you want to see.

Violet doesn't want to see or speak to someone 'holier than thou' anymore.

Moira leaves all smirks and garters where there used to be disapproving frowns and orthopedics.

* * *

Halloween happens. And it's awful.

Five years.

It's the one thing they don't talk about, the one thing they don't bring up or drag into the space between them that they fill up with bitter accusations and harsh words when they actually get back to talking, or arguing, years later.

She doesn't bring it up because it was already tainted with so much when it happened that throwing more dirt at it would only bury it, she doesn't want to bury it.

Dead things get buried.

What's between them hasn't died, nothing dies for real in the Murder House.

He doesn't bring it up because he knows that she thinks of it as a mistake, he isn't going to make it a bigger one, won't dig around in the wound just to make it sting more because he loves her.

But because they can't bury it they can't forget it.

She'd found him in the attic and admitted that she was lonely. She won't ever admit it but he knows when she asked him not to send her away she was _begging_ that he wouldn't.

He knew she hadn't had enough pulls off the bottle of Rum in the liquor cabinet to be considered the least bit drunk but he'd acted like she had been, just in case that's what she wanted.

But she wasn't and he knew.

And she vehemently denied being drunk even when he told her she was, trying to be noble.

She'd climbed into his lap and begged him not to send her away with her lips pressing into his neck, telling him she was so lonely, telling him she didn't want to make herself cum that night, that she wanted him to do it, adding the reminder that it didn't _have_ to be him if he told her no.

He winced when she threw back at him the promise he made that it'd be them together, always, forever. Winced when she asked him if that was a lie too.

When he didn't kiss her back she whined like a dying animal and pulled back before swooping in, bruising his mouth with her tongue and her teeth.

He told her he couldn't do it, lied really. She called bullshit like she always did, does, and whispered that she knew what he feels like when he's hard behind his jeans. She put her hands between them and pawed him while smiling bitterly with how right she was.

But he had tried.

And when he still didn't kiss her back she stood up and stripped off her clothes, crawled on top of him, and he didn't stop her from undressing him too.

For all her bravado she sunk down on him, filling herself up, looking like every bit the inexperienced girl she still was, still is. He almost cried, rolling them over to give her what she wanted that she didn't know how to take herself. He made it easier for her to blame him later, if they'd ever talked about later.

It was him that moved inside of her and touched her because she hadn't gotten the hang of it, them together like that, how to go about it. He wondered if maybe she just didn't want to forget, in case she ever did forgive him, in case this was the way one day they would be making up for years of absence and anger.

He kissed her back and she swung a leg around his hips and turned them over.

There was something so far away about her then. It wasn't so sweetly suffocating without her chest pressed up against his and her flat belly swelling against his when she took a breath and her arms around his shoulders. Her eyes were closed and his were open and he was watching her small breasts jostle just a bit and her hot, hot, hot little cunt eat up his cock but she was listening to him breathe to her ass slap against the tops of his thighs.

Her hands were all over his chest and stomach and her nails pressed shallow crescents into his skin, the tops of her thighs were damp and warm under his hands when he rubbed them, she swallowed and her insides clenched, greedy.

As much as he tried he wasn't really there, wasn't able to get to the point where he could really get off, he wasn't sure if it was because she wasn't moving how he needed her too or if because his mind just couldn't stop telling him how fucked up, how awful, how ruined he'd made things.

How much he'd ruined her, enough to have her not speak to him for five years and then show up asking for _this_.

She'd arched and keened, rubbing against him, her head lolling forward and her shoulders sagging, breathing hard through an orgasm, looking at him when she was done, looking at him with a silent accusation since he was still hard inside of her.

And he knew what it was she wanted to say, wanted to ask. Ask him if he hadn't finished because she wasn't good enough, he didn't like her, didn't love her anymore.

She hadn't liked herself so much then, felt guilty and awful and she'd wanted him to feel it too. When she leaned down and pulled off of him he closed his eyes, waiting for her to go, to leave again. But she didn't and he'd murmured half-hearted denials and refusals when she kissed her way down, down, down.

He guesses the reason she pushed her fingers in his mouth was so he wouldn't be able to tell her no when she licked the head of cock, sucked kisses into it, gagged around it when she tried to swallow too much of him.

And her mouth tasted like him, later. Later when they were on their backs staring at the ceiling and she reached over after enough time had gone by to stroke him until he was hard again.

He'd grabbed her wrist but she just forced his hand down between her legs and told him she wasn't ready to leave yet, that she wanted more, that he had to do it again.

And he did. Pressed her back against the hardwood and pushed open her legs with his hands under hers knees, and he'd been so deep inside of her she'd squeaked at the end of every gasp with every thrust.

She'd been about to cum again, right fucking there, and in his head was the unwanted image of her mother making the same face, he wanted to throw up but his dick twitched and he'd pulsed out inside of her, dying a little bit, he didn't know he was sobbing into her sweaty shoulder until she told him to stop and to shut the fuck up.

And he hates her a little bit for that. That she couldn't, wouldn't comfort him when _he _needed it most.

* * *

She's still wearing the stolen cotton candy colored sandals high enough the drop kick a horse in the mouth and socks with bows. They picked out a dress for her, canary yellow gingham with white buttons down the front and cap sleeves; she put it on after Lorraine came to collect them. The clip Angie put in her hair started digging at her scalp, she took that off.

Everything about it implies jail bait but she's lacking in the Lolita vibe somehow, she can't figure out how. She's still all angles but things fit different lately, she thinks she's getting older but then sometimes she realizes she's still an eternal sweet sixteen.

She's still in the living girl's bedroom, it's a perfect day outside, but her mood has made staying inside to grumble and chain-smoke much more appealing that lounging on the lawn and staring at clouds.

Moira is standing in the doorway when she looks up from last month's issue of Cosmopolitan,"Here to bust me for being on Blondie's bed?"

"No."

Violet frowns down at the glossy pages, "Then what do you want?"

"To apologize," Moira says and that catches her attention enough to actually look at the redhead. "You're lonely. I thought you were just horny. But if you were you could have gone to someone else, someone who doesn't understand it."

Despite what she's saying there's a way in which she says things that sets Violet's teeth on edge, it sounds like she's reading from a script that's boring her.

"Just leave me alone," she scowls and goes back to reading sex tips inspired by some dumb movie. Moira's heels click and the bed dips when she kneels at the foot of it, all prowl about to pounce. "I do understand, Violet."

"No, you don't."

She takes her magazine out of her hands and tosses it onto the floor, Violet has something to say about manners but Moira's curling forward into her space, her tongue darting out to make her red lips shiny.

"You want to be able to touch someone again, to have them touch you, to comfort you; it's as much about forgetting for a little while as it is about feeling good. I had done that once, it didn't turn out very well. Can I kiss you?"

And it's amazing how easy she is to calm down. It's been a long time since someone's kissed her, since she's felt giddy about it before it even happens. Violet nods and Moira's red lips are pressed soft against her chapped ones.

The inside of her mouth is hot and her tongue is sliding over hers and it feels good. It's welcome and easy and comforting in all the ways making out is supposed to be. It starts off feeling lazy and then evolves into something slow and filthy. A promise. An invitation.

"I don't know if he's in here or not sometimes," she admits against Moira's mouth, she feels her smile against her cheek, "He's not. But he might be outside the door. He does that. Do you really want to hear this?"

"No."

And with that she's pressed into the pillows and the mattress and Moira's got hands running down the front of her body, Violet can feel the edges of her nails through the thin cotton, they trace the shape of her small breasts.

"These are bigger."

"What?"

"Still pretty small. Not as small, though."

"Sometimes I feel so old," Violet admits. Sometimes she thinks that she's older than she used to be, but when she starts looking at her reflection her face is the same as it's always been. Like her new found maturity and burgeoning womanhood is hiding from her, what a joke, she thinks.

"Older, not old. There's a difference."

"Thought I was imagining it, not so hard to believe hanging out with you."

"Maybe it's what you want."

"Not all the time."

"Nobody wants the same thing _all_ the time."

"Yeah, that's why you're here right?"

"I thought you wanted this."

She does.

She's still wearing the dress, unbuttoned and opened, and the socks when Moira goes down between her thighs, and she's squirming on the bed, trying to breathe and forgetting how at the same time. Her vocabulary shrinks to just a few syllables and her cunt throbs.

By the time Moira leaves the room her nipples ache from teeth pulling on them and there's sweat dripping down the back of her neck.

It smells like lily of the valley perfume and orgasms in the room.

There are scratches from long nails on her ass when she checks in the mirror and a bruise sucked into her neck. Her hairs a mess and she looks completely fucked out.

She'd come thinking about him watching, at the time it seemed erotic, now it just seems disgusting and hollow. She buttons her dress back up, puts on her underwear, and smokes while staring at herself in the mirror.

* * *

She sees them sometimes, sitting in the den with after dinner drinks. Charles stoned out of his mind and Nora sloppily drunk. They seem at ease, at first, but give it enough time and there's always the echo of shattering crystal and once in every long while a resounding smack.

One night, after ten, (she remembers thinking that they were starting early this time), there's one word too many from Nora and the chair Charles is sitting in thunders back as he stands.

He lunges.

Nora's head cracks off the fireplace mantel and she's bleeding all over the hardwood, head wounds are messy like that.

And then things are quiet. Charles pours a drink and waits. His wife comes back around. Disoriented and docile. She cries, softly. She asks where the baby is. Charles, for once is coming out of a stupor instead of into one. He says they'll make one.

Violet's listening on the stairs while Nora confusedly keeps asking and Charles starts getting edgy. Her stomach turns over in her belly when she knows what's going on in the den. And maybe Nora is used to this sort of thing every once in awhile, a husband taking what husbands of her time take from their wives, maybe Charles is still high.

But Nora wails and Violet's in the room and stabbing Charles in the neck with a forsaken dessert fork over and over again until there's not enough larynx for him to so much as hiss at her.

Nora cries and smacks her and soon enough Charles is coming back to the world of the living dead and Violet has had just enough to phase back upstairs, she sits down in the hallway and cries.

* * *

He walks in on them. It's their fault; they're fucking in the kitchen. Ben Harmon's got his loving wife holding onto the kitchen counter like the lap bar on a jerky amusement park ride.

They don't see him.

He hears Ben tell his wife that he loves her and the same from her not a beat later.

Sometimes he wonders how on earth she didn't know it wasn't Ben sooner.

He can remember walking in on them in the kitchen once before, when they first moved in, except they hadn't been fucking then. Instead, he had heard Ben tell his wife that she'd have to forgive him once day.

He holding out hope because as it turned out Vivien did, and Violet is a lot more like her mom than she'd care to admit.

* * *

**A/N:** I hope this makes up for my absence.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author:** grayglube

**Title:** Call of the Void

**Summary:** This is how they fall in love, for real, this time.

**Rating:** M

**Warning(s)/Kinks: **Language, sexual situations, drug use, triggery language related to rape, femslash, offensive language related to homosexuality.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own American Horror Story.

**A/N:** So this is part two. This is where Jandy will find out what the second pairing I planned to have in this is. I wanted unexpected pairings. Like the Violet/Patrick friendship and the Violet/Moira femslash pairing.

* * *

**II.**

She yawns like a door that's been closed for a hundred years opens, a muted thing that looks deafening, plumes of smoke that look like dust pouring out from around her teeth.

They're at the point where if they see the other they stop and then quickly move out of the other's orbit, but it's better than just disappearing he supposes.

He's looking at her slender legs, pale and looking longer than they are with the ragged hem of a too long t-shirt brushing the skin inches above her knees.

There's sleep crust in her eyelashes and she wipes at it frantically, blinking away the blurriness.

"You look good when you're tired."

Her hair is a wild mess of pushed down and pushed up strands, tangles and clusters, there a raw red stripe on her bottom lip from where she'd peeled off a chapped bit with her teeth, her tongue presses against it and she deadpans Robert Graves, "As Earth stirs in her winter sleep and puts out grass and flowers despite the snow, despite the falling snow."

He wants to take a step towards her, another one further into the kitchen from where's he's standing at the back door, wants to keep taking steps, back her up into the pantry, knock the door closed and tumble onto the first cushioned service with her.

He wants to feel the hot insides of her plush thighs on his hips and feel her tongue slide against his slow, wet. Run his hand over the slope of her bare shoulders where the shirt sags, loose and unobtrusive.

All he does is swallow and look up from staring at her toes, small, girlish, painted sticky candy red, thinking about kissing them, how they'd feel on his lips, all he does is say, "You can't leave it hanging like that."

"Yes, I can." And then tacking on, "Fuck you," she turns, twisting on one dainty ankle and padded along down the hall, the floorboards creaking under her weight as she goes.

He's grinding his teeth and breathing out harsh and fast through his nostrils trying to not give in and follow her, catch up, grab her by her sleep mussed hair and bang her temple into the wall, the furniture, the floor.

* * *

Patrick can tell she's forgiving her axe-happy estranged lover boy. He saw the same thing with Chad, still does sometimes. There's rationalization and the finger pointing at her reflection instead of at the boy she's still desperately trying to hold onto some hate for.

"It was a coin toss. I'm a three on the sorting algorithm of mortality," she says talking about her own death, Patrick just nods and tries to not say something she'll squawk over, because she's a girl and they do love squawking, like drag queens wearing Tropicana headdresses.

* * *

The old owners put the house on the market once their golden girl goes away to college. They've got glossy pictures of pricey condos strewn across the coffee table in the living room and then the floor when they shove the table to increase usable carpeted floor space.

Middle-age mixed with an increase in libido since their kid has been packed up and shipped off to whatever out of state school with reasonable dorm process and low alcohol related death statistics is not something he needs or wants to see the result of. It's depressing to watch other people fuck.

Houses with homicide history are back in vogue, Caspar's cool again and people like houses with soul(s).

* * *

Sometimes she gets violently ill. It happens.

It happens to them all. Sometimes her mom starts bleeding out from Placentea Abrupto, or Charles' temple collapses and his brains leak out down the side of his face, Patrick doubles over from the pain of a perforated colon and needs to find another pair of pants.

And Tate of course drowns on dry land, lungs slowly filling up with blood and makes a mess.

She thinks that one day when she really loves him, she'll know. She'll know because instead of stepping back she'll kneel down into his blood puddle and watch him come around again before leaving or maybe not leave. Maybe she'll let him fuck her in it; the idea does get her a little hot when she stops to consider it.

To be fair though he doesn't stick around when he finds her vomiting uncontrollably, half-delirious and sweating profusely either.

* * *

She can see what he's offering, and, she sees why they say yes. With him everything is fragile and sweet and feels good. She can see other things too, when it comes to him, her _brother_ who looks like an old lover, when he passes by a window like a shadow instead of a boy, or how his reflection in the glossy metal of a kitchen appliance is bigger, taller, darker, the smell that leaks out of him, not fire, not brimstone, it's dirt and lilies, he smells like a funeral.

* * *

She's cute. With a cute little upturned nose and a cute little head of spring back curls from a mother whose a past beauty queen with hopes of her daughter continuing the legacy and a three-hundred dollar beauty salon perm.

Her name is cute too, single syllable simple. Jill.

You can hear her practicing her wind instrument from the far end of the backyard. Constance's dog bark and yap happily, and Michael looks over at the house from behind the shrubs.

* * *

She brushed against him, barest pressure, all from her loose clothes and layers on top of layers, like grass against more grass in gentle wind.

He wanted to reach out and grab her hand, pull her back and smile.

Have her grin that shit-eating smile of hers back.

Longing.

It's the crux of their entire relationship.

Unresolved.

* * *

They go to the same school, they see each other when his normal teacher takes her class for Math and her's teacher takes his class for Science, on field trips, and in the small cafeteria they've gotten sick of. Mostly he comes over when Constance gets tired of him, or is hopelessly inebriated. He leaves under the guise of walking the dogs or just not going home when school ends, walking in her back door instead.

She likes the little dogs he has with him, they sleep on top of her feet while they do their homework at the kitchen table or chew on the chair cushions. Her mother doesn't really like that but she thinks Michael is a good boy. A positive boy. A good influence.

But the little girl who's just growing out of grade school knows he isn't, but she doesn't mind because Violet can tell that she's not a nice girl despite her big eyes and curls, gentle face and delicate hands.

"Mikey! You can't do it like that! It's gonna look like a weird turd."

"They're just eggs."

"_Jesus_ eggs."

He glances up with a grin and a peek of bright white enamel, "Blasphemer."

She giggles, "Ooooh, big words. That one in your vocabulary book this week?"

"The most holy of vocabulary books."

Constance makes him read the Bible, copy out pages as punishment for when he's been bad.

"Ugh, you're grams is so fucking _weird_."

He looks up at the profanity, she glances back, bashful like she's been waiting to try out curse words for awhile.

"Yeah. That one looks nice."

"Want me to paint the Virgin Mary on it so you can give it to grandma? Maybe she'll take pity on you."

"For what?"

"For what happened today."

Any number of things could have happened Violet knows but she's betting on something only mildly reprehensible for the way both little kids smile at each other. Michael sighs, "School probably already called. I'll be writing pages until my fingers bleed."

"Gruesome. You could finger paint your egg then," she says. Michael rolls his eyes,"Sinister: Threatening or portending evil, harm, or trouble; ominous. Girls named Jill."

"That's in the next vocab unit, for next week. Stop reading ahead smarty pants. Portending? Is that even a word?"

"To bring in, herald."

The phone in the hallway rings. Jill's mother answers, cradling the phone between her cheek and her shoulder greeting Constance on the other line.

Michael wilts visibly and Jill brightens, "Oh, the sound of the phone ringing portends your doomed and miserable fate."

"And then?"

"_Death_."

"Michael! You're grandmother is on the phone, she'd like to talk to you."

"If my ears start bleeding bring a canvas, we can call it 'woe of the child'."

"You're so dramatic."

* * *

His sneakers are muddy and his windbreaker has raindrops rolling off it. There's another boy with him who shoves him. Michael laughs. The other boy has been around, with Michael and Jill. But every so often he comes over to see Jill and Michael is not invited. It's innocent and they're fifteen but Violet was fifteen when she first moved into the house. She remembers what it was like to be alive and fifteen. Michael and the other boy go inside his house, Constance is out on a trip to gamble for two days and a night. Violet doesn't see the boy get picked up that night, she doesn't see him leave on his own, she doesn't see him get on the bus the next morning with Michael Langdon. The boy never comes back out of the house next door. Sometimes she wonders what happened to him.

* * *

Jill looks smaller than she actually is, Violet realizes this when she's trying on a pair of stockings from the girl's underwear drawer, they're too long and are baggy on her ass.

The bras are bigger too.

Violet slams the drawer shut wishing for once someone her own size would move into the house.

Sometime when she feels masochistic she watches Jill get dressed or put on her make-up or brush her hair. Such routine things being carried out like some ritual that means something more.

The living girl does all her self-care activities with some wistful, glee etched onto the shape of her lips, the apples of her cheeks, like the whole thing is a hobby she secretly enjoys.

Violet tries to emulate it one day when she goes away on an overnight field trip to some music competition where she's first seat clarinet.

Lipstick rubs off on her fingers when she smokes and losses its appeal.

"Her mother's coming up to put laundry away."

She looks back at his reflection in the vanity mirror and promptly makes herself scarce and relocates.

* * *

They have a conversation over the space of a few carefully space long silences and about two and a half cigarettes, chain smoked without pause on her part and a few bouts of bluster along a string of some very ugly words on his.

"You know if you had let me kill that kid I would have hurt him after he was dead if it ever turned out you really decided to do it with him."

"Do it? Yeah, really? Just say it. If I ever wanted to really fuck someone you'd kill them, right? That's what you mean?"

"Yes."

"Is that because in your world view we still end up at some point fucking each other?"

"…"

"Well? Go ahead. Tell me. I wanna know. How do you picture it? Is it because I'm just so angry at you I need to fuck you to get across to you my anger? Is it because I'm lonely, because I miss you, because I just can't handle it anymore and need your dick to make me feel better?"

"I'd just find you while you're sleeping and rape you, if all I cared about was fucking you."

"…"

"No, really. I don't think it'd be that hard actually. 'Go ahead. Tell me.' Fine. I know where you sleep. At first you'd think you'd be able to stop me but you'd tire yourself out trying and I wonder what it'd be like to be so worn down you can't even stop me from taking off your clothes like that, one thing at a time and then it's not just about fighting me because you're naked and you wouldn't want me to see you naked because you hate me, and when you'd finally realize that I'm actually going to be in you, you'd scream, because it scares you, not being in control, and it'd probably be worse than anything I ever did to anyone.

And all that self-important, self-righteous bullshit about needing to know the real me would just be biting you in the ass at that point while you're crying because I actually went and proved you right and fucked you just because I could, because I wanted to and didn't give a shit what you wanted, that I crossed some line that doesn't exist because we're dead that you think still applies, that if I did it once I could do it again, and it'd turn out not to be as sweet as you thought it was, knowing everything about me.

Because the truth is that I've thought about it, jerked off thinking about it, but I haven't done anything. Have I?"

"That it? You got more to say? Go ahead. Get it out; maybe it will make you _feel_ better."

"Okay, Doctor Harmon Junior. I've thought about coming around when you're high."

"…"

"Laudanum knocks you on your ass, feels like a dream. Maybe I'd show up then, and maybe you'd be in to it. Probably not, but maybe. You'd beg me for it, even if you didn't I'd make you and then when you wake up and I'm not there but you're still all sticky and sore from it, from everything you'd ask me to do, you'd feel as fucking disgusted with yourself as I did after I put that suit on and climbed on top of your mom."

"…"

"It was going to be you, the first time I saw you. Your mom was pretty frigid towards your dad and it didn't seem like they'd be making babies that I could steal and smother for Nora. I almost didn't even do it. Almost couldn't, because with you it would have taken a long time to get in your pants, or if I just snuck into your room and played mystery rapist the first thing police do is go through who has access to the house and then it'd turn out that your dad has a dead guy for a patient, too much mess.

But then there was the suit and the house turning your dad into a brain dead zombie at night and your mom started working things out with him. And I felt bad about it, before I even did it. I felt bad because she's your mom, so I talked to you and decided the least I could do would be to try and make up for it even though you didn't know about it by helping you out with that bitch from school, and saving you from those assholes that tried to drown you even though you told me you never wanted to see me again, even though I was angry, even though it was only your mom and her dumb babies I really needed to make sure stayed alive."

"You could have let me die, would have been stuck here."

"I wasn't in love with you then."

"When did you fall in love with me, Tate?"

"You don't believe that I love you?"

"I think you're stupid for thinking that that's what you felt, if it is for real…then it is, but if you're going to give me a sad little boy spiel about love I'd rather not talk to you at all."

"It was when you're dad almost caught us talking outside. You thought I was hiding in the bushes but really he just couldn't see me. I told you he was a good dad and that you were lucky and you just leaned in and let me light you cigarette without a word. Like my opinion didn't really matter.

They say you go for someone who's like your mom or your dad, and you and Constance have the 'I don't give a shit about your opinion' thing down pretty well. I would never do those things to you and even when you hate me now I would never let anyone do something like that to you. You never have to worry about anyone doing anything like that to you ever. But it's still you and me, Vee. Us. Nobody else. Even if you'd want somebody else. Not now, not after that."

"And what's 'that'?"

"Halloween."

"You can't protect me from everything, that fucking thing that killed my mother could come around to. That thing you put inside of her could fucking do that. And it'd be all your fault."

"…"

"And if he did you'd probably feel a lot like my dad did when he found out about you raping my mother."

"I would cut off parts of myself if that's what it would take to protect you, I'd kill anyone for you, anytime. To make up for everything I've done."

"Just remember that."

"Do you forgive me or not?"

"Just because everything you ever did and lied about or didn't tell me isn't the first and last thing I think about when I'm conscious anymore does _not_ mean I forgive you and it doesn't mean I don't forgive you. It doesn't matter anymore. I don't trust you. I don't believe you, or the things you say or the things you promise me."

"Then how do I prove it?"

"Kinda can't, I guess. That _blows_."

"Is this a punishment? For that night, for not making you go away?"

"Stop talking about it or I'll make you go away. If the world was going to end and this is the way things are when it happens and I never talked to you like I used to or kissed you or touched you again, right now at this moment that's okay with me. If I was facing nonexistence a minute from now I wouldn't regret us the way we are now. That's what this is. That's how I feel about you."

"That's how you feel about _us_."

"Semantics, Tate."

"No. It's not."

"You miss me, you just don't want to be around me. You want me to come around when you want me to and leave when you say and be your pet. I don't even mind that much."

"Don't you get tired of this? Bullshitting? I see it sometimes, the real parts of you. So, don't you think we're a little past this?"

"I don't want to see you cry, it makes me tired and it's annoying. I've been here long enough haven't I? To figure out that you were just playing some game when I was still alive because you were lonely, and I was available and liked you."

"I wasn't playing a game."

"There's a game when you pretend to be somebody else isn't there? You were, don't lie about it now. What's the point?"

"Believe it or not you putting your dick in my mom while pretending to be my dad so she would get pregnant and you could steal her baby and kill it so some ghost who doesn't even remember she's dead most of the time and is a terrible mother could have a baby that was less of a monster than the one she caused to get kidnapped, cut up, and then mashed together Frankenstein style by her drug addicted husband inhabiting the basement is, is not the thing that bothers me the most."

"You are _not_ some misunderstood kid, you're not this tortured soul, we were never this Romeo and Juliet scenario you fed me some lines about and I was just your replacement for Nora. And you thought I'd never know because in your head you think you're better than me and smarter and you are just a stupid fucking shithead and I was just really fucking dumb and lonely and you made me play your stupid game and I guess you won because you fucked me and I let you and you lied to me and I didn't even really put up much of a fight to find out the truth. But I'm not going to play your stupid games and I'm not going to talk to you if you're gonna pretend to not know the difference between right and wrong or play the 'I don't remember, I don't know, why would I do that,' card, because you're full of shit and talking to you at all makes me want to throw up on myself anyway so talking to you while you pretend not to be at fault for anything makes me want to throw myself off the roof just so I won't have to listen to you and you're fake crying act again."

"How old are we now? We really gonna do this for the rest of eternity, you really gonna try to convince me you're sorry and that you're really not a bad person? Come on. Go fuck yourself, asshole."

"You sound like you dad."

She could say that his flippancy is just his armor against her analysis of him but it'd be a waste of breath she doesn't need to breathe.

* * *

She kisses him. It's her party. She can do what she wants. Violet scoffs and observes from a far enough distance away that it makes no difference that the orange glow of her cigarette is visible, it's not like either of them will notice it.

Michael smiles back and picks up her hand, swinging it back and forth before leaning in to peck her lips with his.

"Happy Birthday."

"Where's my present?"

"That was it."

"Don't be mean to me. Present." Little Jill holds out her palms waiting to receive her token for another year of breathing. Michael wraps a big hand around her small wrist and tugs while turning, "Come on."

Jill twists away and sways a little with a girlish smile. I'm not going anywhere if it means walking across your backyard, I know it's been like a week since you pooper scooped.

"Brat. I'll be right back."

He disappears beyond the hedges and returns with a flat rectangle wrapped in gaudy little girl wrapping paper that Jill snickers at. She tears off the shiny paper with flourish and the scraps fly back from her fingers like birds in flight."Woah."

"It's you."

"Well thank gawd I thought it was my evil twin or something."

"You like it?"

"Red really is my color."

"Yeah, absolutely."

Later when Jill's asleep and the portrait hangs on the wall across from her bed Violet is stuck still in front of it. Red. It's blood and water. Or tears if Michael is sentimental. She wonders if it's his blood or someone else's, wonder if he's ever had to kill someone for the girl her loves.

* * *

He can see it on Michael's face. He knows. Michael looks at the girl like he wants to say she's beautiful and wonderful and is everything he ever wanted, like she deserves only good things and gifts and flowers and music and love.

But Tate also knows his son won't say it because he's not any of those things, he's not good or wonderful, he's not full of music and love and he's not the type of boy who picks flowers for the girl he loves.

He'll give her someone's head, make someone who's hurt her scream, paint her a portrait from tapping his own vein, but he won't write her poetry or promise to love her forever.

* * *

"What's changed?"

"Nothing."

"You've changed."

"Wish I didn't. It was nice hating you, nice not wanting to be around you."

She sets up the board, his side too.

"But you can't do anything about things like that; everything gets replaced with other things," she looks up and says when she's finished.

"Like what?"

He places himself on the other side of the black and white and waits for her move.

"I'm scared."

"Of what?"

"He's going to kill her."

"He won't."

"There's nothing I can do. Nothing you can do. It's going to happen. Gonna happen just like me winning happens. I know right away."

"What about us?"

"What about _us_?"

"…"

"I may have gotten over it but now it's just going to be that much easier to hate you when you fuck up again."

"I won't."

"Maybe I will."

He wonders if that's what he should be worried about.

* * *

She fit inside her like a Russian nestling doll and it was undeniably vulnerable feeling in some odd way because while the shell is what gets cracked on the edge of a bowl it's the yolk that gets eaten and she was left feeling like an unfertilized chicken embryo about to be served over easy with a sprinkling of pepper and some parsley garnish.

And she was so forcefully pushed out that both she and the other girl both stumbled in opposite directions of the hallway.

She's gone when Jill turns around, afraid and confused looking for something that she isn't going to find.

Shaking from the experience Violet smokes outside and ruminates on her latest discovery about ghostly abilities.

* * *

She can't really feel what's going on.

But the principle is just about the same as watching it happen except that's not right either.

She _can_ feel it, just not in the way she'd been hoping.

It feels like for awhile that she's less real than she already is, she's just a disembodied spook show voice in the back of someone's head while their high on something good and feeling good. But, there's a connection and an overlap that she slips under like a body lost in a rip current. She's not riding along in the backseat anymore during the ride, she's being thrown out the windshield and out onto the road being run over by the car. It doesn't quite feel like an orgasm, what she's having, but its close enough, but maybe not close enough to count.

And the sound Michael makes is enough to make it worth it. It's been awhile since she heard a boy come.

She's slipping out of Jill, whose a little is too far gone to notice she was even there to begin with.

Violet had been hoping sex possession would be a bit more exciting and kill all her own urges for something more fulfilling than her own fingers, but it hasn't.

In the hallway she runs into Tate, taking a step back to avoid him. He looks stricken, scared. It makes her angry, him listening at the door to people having sex with each other.

"Don't worry, he's fucking his girlfriend." Or just about, but Tate doesn't need to know the rest of the story. Despite everything that's happened between them she no longer looks for reasons to take him down a notch like she used to with the things she does or doesn't do.

Still, he's so pale. The idea of her just watching other people fuck enough to make him nauseous.

He opens his mouth but she's half-way gone to some other place and doesn't catch what he says.

* * *

She's got her eye on the house across the street. There's a hornet buzzing around, just passing through, it's a blur that makes her eye water and she pulls away blinking back the strain.

"What are you doing?"

"People watching."

She puts her eye back when the hornet flies out the open window, catching itself in the gauze white of the curtains on the way out.

"You're a creepy voyeur."

"I won't let you peek if you act like that," she mumbles shifting the telescope to look down into the street at the two girls swinging backpacks and cackling loudly at something funny they're talking about.

"Let me?"

She grunts noncommittally and Patrick nudged her but his increased stature makes it feel more like a shove and she stumbles back, banging into the mattress of the master bed while Patrick tries to find a view that's more appealing, like a teenage boy in the throes of sexual ecstasy in his uncurtained bedroom.

"Hey!"

"Too bad, baby sister."

Violet flops back onto the bed, "Ugh."

"I did have one you know."

"A sister?"

Patrick turns back to her "Yeah. But she's older, she's a fucking asshole."

"Yeah?" She questions thinking of how if her family had never died she'd have been the asshole older sister, eventually.

She's back at the telescope, "God, why don't people have curtains?"

"Don't jinx it."

"I watched some of your gay porn."

"What? When?"

"The other day. It's up in the attic."

"Thought it got tossed."

"Tate hid it."

"…"

The silence says a lot with the look Patrick gives her. She sighs, "He's not gay."

"I didn't say anything."

"Okay."

She's gone looking for treasure in the chest of drawers on the opposite side of the room.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Not about him."

"Nevermind."

There's more silence. It's stings like hornets in her mouth, "What about him?"

"…"

"Yeah, go ahead ask."

"Is he fucked up all the time?"

"Like crazy?"

Patrick looks straight ahead at the wall and she shouldn't have told him to ask his no doubt awful question about her and Tate, shouldn't have asked him to clarify the question further.

"I meant like is he fucked up like…you know…, sex."

"…"

Sex.

That's all everyone talks about besides pain and angst and what the living are doing.

"Nevermind, sorry. I just, I don't know, saw you talking to him and, yeah, I know that has nothing to do with the question. Sorry. Forget it."

But she can't, not when it's been brought up.

"I don't mind talking to you, but I wouldn't really care if we didn't. You feel the same way right?"

"Yeah, absolutely," Patrick asserts, like the threat that she's not going to talk to him anymore isn't as horrible to him as it would be to her.

"Well, then if this offends you. I don't really care that he killed you or anyone. Even what he did to my mom I can justify because that's just what you do when you have to know, and think about it even if you don't want to. And yes, the idea of his dick in me makes eating my own vomit out of a cereal bowl a more appealing reality. But he lied, he pretended and because of that I did things that I wouldn't have done if he hadn't lied. I said things that I don't know I would have said if he wasn't who he made he think he was. And they were things I did and said that when I do them or say them now they seem less meaningful, because he ruined them."

Patrick's got a face like a Halloween mask of it, flat affect, a little sad even, "Hey…I didn't mean…"

She knows he didn't mean to bum her out so much she's itching for the oblivion a razor blade in the bathtub would offer her, she knows he didn't mean to make her think about Tate and how gentle he was with her, cautious and careful, making her cum, making her say his name the way girls only do when a boy inside of them, falling in love and forgetting that they have to breathe.

"Yeah. I know. But, no. He's not some weird sex fiend or anything, I don't know maybe he is and I just don't know. Right?"

He'd trace her lip with his thumb; ring warm against her chin, his eyelashes would brush her cheek while he'd bleat out a groan in her ear.

"Yeah."

"You ever watch guys walk down the street and wonder what it'd be like if they were your boyfriend."

"Or how good of a fuck they'd be? Yeah."

"That too."

"It's alright you know."

"Talking to Tate?"

"Yeah."

"He's not pretending anymore."

"I guess it makes a difference."

"I don't know what I'm trying to do," she sighs.

"Are you trying to do something? He'd still fuck you, if you asked him. He's a guy."

"It's not like that. It's like before, wanting to know who he was. But, he ruined it. I don't want to know anything about him."

_Taint. _He wrote it on the chalkboard and proceeded to do just that to everything she thought they had, that they made, that they did.

"But you do."

"Yeah. Exactly."

She knows he's a liar.

"I know."

The older man gets it because he used to play that role in his own relationship, the _Liar_.

"I'm sorry I threw your wedding ring in the furnace."

"Sorry I planned to steal and murder your little brothers to make Chad happy."

Violet grins.

* * *

He watches his son pack up his car, watches him light up a rolled cigarillo that's flavored something sweet, no doubt. Michael's got one arm out the window and the cherry glows bright orange in the thirty slow drifting minutes before dawn.

The girl is dead. Face down in the swimming pool with a belly full of pills, obvious irony there. The father-son talks really paid off, Tate scowls and scrubs at his face for retelling the tale of his own girl's not-so-sweet entrapment in a not-so-gilded cage.

Michael rolls out of the driveway on schedule to make it upstate in time to move in his dorm room.

Tate watches him rattle away on a cold engine down the street, turn slowly at the end of the street and cruise up to the gates that Tate's standing behind.

"Wanted to say goodbye. To you." But he's not looking at Tate.

Jill is standing at the bottom of the steps to the front entry.

"It was so…"

"Perfect," Tate supplies. Michael looks up smiling.

"And it is. At first."

"What about later?"

Tate doesn't know about later, he's still waiting for it.

"Guess we'll both have to wait."

Michael sighs and his eyes gleam. Glow in the dark like the reflection of the end of lit cigarillo. It isn't the cigarillo. It's crematorium ash glow and the smell of a wake. He puts on sunglasses over it."

"Bye, Dad."

* * *

**A/N:** I was going to go a bit further with the Michael subplot in this but ehh things happen. One last part after this.


End file.
